Whiteness

This paper seeks to make meaning of the experience of being white in the United States at this point in history. The self-awareness of white people is limited by a blind spot around the meaning and impact of being white in a multiracial society. Using psychoanalytic and literary methodology, the author seeks to cast light with which to explore this blind spot. Everyday experiences are used to illustrate the widely pervasive impact of race in the lives of white people, and a clinical vignette illustrates how race might show up in a white-on-white psychotherapy. Enactments within this paper are noted when they are evident to the author     

Episodic inhibition

Six experiments examined the proposal that an item of long-term knowledge can be simultaneously inhibited and activated. In 2 directed forgetting experiments items to-be-forgotten were found to be inhibited in list-cued recall but activated in lexical decision tasks. In 3 retrieval practice experiments, unpracticed items from practiced categories were found to be inhibited in category-cued recall but were primed in lexical decision. If, however, the primes and targets in lexical decision were taken directly from the study list, inhibition was observed. Finally, it was found that when items highly associated with a study list were processed in between study and test, no inhibition in recall was present. These, and a broad range of other findings, can be explained by the concept of "episodic inhibition," which proposes that episodic memories retain copies of semantic knowledge structures that preserve patterns of activation/inhibition originally generated in those structures during encoding. ((c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).     

An asymmetry between memory encoding and retrieval. Revelation, generation, and transfer-appropriate processing

Transfer-appropriate-processing accounts of memory emphasize the similarity of encoding and retrieval processes, and imply that experimental manipulations should have similar effects on encoding and retrieval. Exceptions to this expectation are thus of great interest, but extant exceptions (produced by studies using divided attention, alcohol, and benzodiazepines) are debatable, single dissociations between encoding and retrieval. The present experiments demonstrate a reversed dissociation, in which the same variable produced opposite effects when implemented at encoding and retrieval. At encoding, participants either solved anagrams of study words or read intact study words. At retrieval, participants likewise solved anagrams or read intact words prior to making recognition memory judgments. Compared with reading intact words, solving anagrams at encoding enhanced later recognition accuracy, whereas solving anagrams at test impaired accuracy. These results were obtained with old/new decisions (Experiment 1) and with confidence ratings (Experiment 2).     

Integrating gaze direction and expression in preferences for attractive faces

Few studies have investigated how physical and social facial cues are integrated in the formation of face preferences. Here we show that expression differentially qualifies the strength of attractiveness preferences for faces with direct and averted gaze. For judgments of faces with direct gaze, attractiveness preferences were stronger for smiling faces than for faces with neutral expressions. By contrast, for judgments of faces with averted gaze, attractiveness preferences were stronger for faces with neutral expressions than for smiling faces. Because expressions can differ in meaning depending on whether they are directed toward or away from oneself, it is only by integrating gaze direction, facial expression, and physical attractiveness that one can unambiguously identify the most attractive individuals who are likely to reciprocate one's own social interest.     

Statistical learning within and between modalities: pitting abstract against stimulus-specific representations

When learners encode sequential patterns and generalize their knowledge to novel instances, are they relying on abstract or stimulus-specific representations? Research on artificial grammar learning (AGL) has shown transfer of learning from one stimulus set to another, and such findings have encouraged the view that statistical learning is mediated by abstract representations that are independent of the sense modality or perceptual features of the stimuli. Using a novel modification of the standard AGL paradigm, we obtained data to the contrary. These experiments pitted abstract processing against stimulus-specific learning. The findings show that statistical learning results in knowledge that is stimulus-specific rather than abstract. They show furthermore that learning can proceed in parallel for multiple input streams along separate perceptual dimensions or sense modalities. We conclude that learning sequential structure and generalizing to novel stimuli inherently involve learning mechanisms that are closely tied to the perceptual characteristics of the input.     

Spatial memory: how egocentric and allocentric combine

Recent experiments indicate the need for revision of a model of spatial memory consisting of viewpoint-specific representations, egocentric spatial updating and a geometric module for reorientation. Instead, it appears that both egocentric and allocentric representations exist in parallel, and combine to support behavior according to the task. Current research indicates complementary roles for these representations, with increasing dependence on allocentric representations with the amount of movement between presentation and retrieval, the number of objects remembered, and the size, familiarity and intrinsic structure of the environment. Identifying the neuronal mechanisms and functional roles of each type of representation, and of their interactions, promises to provide a framework for investigation of the organization of human memory more generally.     

Training in timing improves accuracy in golf

In this experiment, the authors investigated the influence of training in timing on performance accuracy in golf. During pre- and posttesting, 40 participants hit golf balls with 4 different clubs in a golf course simulator. The dependent measure was the distance in feet that the ball ended from the target. Between the pre- and posttest, participants in the experimental condition received 10 hr of timing training with an instrument that was designed to train participants to tap their hands and feet in synchrony with target sounds. The participants in the control condition read literature about how to improve their golf swing. The results indicated that the participants in the experimental condition significantly improved their accuracy relative to the participants in the control condition, who did not show any improvement. We concluded that training in timing leads to improvement in accuracy, and that our results have implications for training in golf as well as other complex motor activities.     

Person perception across the menstrual cycle: hormonal influences on social-cognitive functioning

Women's reactions to men shift during the menstrual cycle. For example, during the phase of high conception risk, women prefer men with masculinized facial features. A favored explanation for this effect is that women display an enhanced sensitivity to stimuli that have significant reproductive relevance during the phase of the menstrual cycle in which conception risk is high. Consistent with this viewpoint, the present research demonstrated that women's cycle–dependent attentiveness to "maleness" also extends to basic aspects of the person–perception process. Specifically, during the phase of high conception risk, women displayed an enhanced ability both to categorize men and to access associated category–related (i.e., stereotypic) material from semantic memory. The implications of these findings for contemporary treatments of person perception are considered.     

The evolution of epistemology and concepts in an iterative-generative reflective practice: the importance of small differences

Using a contextualist epistemology, it would be expected that regional differences in community psychology would develop over time. It is argued that the epistemology and theory of Western Australian community psychology, while largely based on North American approaches, has developed its own idiosyncracies. These developed through the integration of practice and theory in an iterative-generative fashion. The process of development is conceptualized in terms of Schön's and Altman's distinctions between foundational knowledge, and professional and socially responsive knowledge (I. Altman, 1996; D. A. Schön, 1983). It has also been characterized as an incremental development based on the reflection on tacit and conceptual knowledge. From the small differences that have developed between regions, a dialogue can emerge that will better allow understanding of how social forces shape people's actions.     

Attention and perceptual implicit memory: effects of selective versus divided attention and number of visual objects

Extant research presents conflicting results on whether manipulations of attention during encoding affect perceptual priming. Two suggested mediating factors are type of manipulation (selective vs divided) and whether attention is manipulated across multiple objects or within a single object. Words printed in different colors (Experiment 1) or flanked by colored blocks (Experiment 2) were presented at encoding. In the full-attention condition, participants always read the word, in the unattended condition they always identified the color, and in the divided-attention conditions, participants attended to both word identity and color. Perceptual priming was assessed with perceptual identification and explicit memory with recognition. Relative to the full-attention condition, attending to color always reduced priming. Dividing attention between word identity and color, however, only disrupted priming when these attributes were presented as multiple objects (Experiment 2) but not when they were dimensions of a common object (Experiment 1). On the explicit test, manipulations of attention always affected recognition accuracy.